Why Was the Gold Rush So Deadly for California’s Indians?

By the time of the gold rush, California Indians had already lived with the Spanish and Mexicans for eighty years. The presence of Spanish and Mexican settlers had meant exploitation and a declining Indian population, but the Indians had managed to reach a rough accommodation with the Hispanic newcomers. The arrival of the gold seekers, however, brought demographic disaster. Almost overnight, the Indians experienced near destruction. Approximately 150,000 when the gold rush began, the Indian population dropped to less than 30,000 by 1860. Why did the forty-niners turn California into a killing field?

Most obviously, forty-niner violence killed many Indians. Gold seekers—young, armed, and male—often harbored deep racial prejudices. As one miner said, California Indians were “about the lowest specimen of humanity found on earth.” At the same time, manifest destiny taught that whites were a superior race who advanced civilization, once Indians were out of the way. Largely unpoliced, the early mining frontier placed few restraints on the miners’ prejudices and greed. Because California Indians lived in small groups and not in powerful nations whose warriors could fight pitched battles with invaders, wholesale murder was not difficult. “There were so many of these expeditions,” remembered one white participant in the campaigns against the Yuki. “We would kill on average fifty or so Indians on a trip.” One contemporary described white behavior toward Indians during the gold rush as “one of the last human hunts of civilization, and the basest and most brutal of them all.”

Without ignoring the violence done to Indians, historians have also identified a raft of less obvious but probably even more important causes of the destruction of California’s Indian population. Some of these developments were unplanned, even unintended, but they were nevertheless deadly.

The sheer number of forty-niners meant that they pushed hard against the natural resources on which Indians depended. Indians were concentrated in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, a rich ecosystem that supported one of the densest Indian populations in North America. But the foothills were also where the gold was. As miners poured in, furiously tearing up the land and polluting the rivers, they destroyed the Indians’ food supply. Women found it difficult to gather the greens, seeds, and most importantly acorns that sustained their families. Men could no longer fish, and hunting produced fewer and fewer deer. With their hunting and gathering grounds ravaged, Indians faced starvation.

Indians responded in a variety of ways. Many withdrew into the high Sierra, an environment that provided even less food. Others tried to adapt by working in the new economy. One white settler admitted that Indians were at first “saved so much as possible for labour.” But conflict with miners soon drove Indian workers out of gold country, and work as ranch hands and farm laborers disappeared with the arrival of white labor and machines. Starvation forced some Indians to turn to livestock raiding, which gave whites another excuse to attack them. Labor for whites, therefore, did not save the Indians.

Close proximity to whites was dangerous, and not just because it invited murder. Malnourishment weakened Indians’ resistance to disease, and waves of epidemics of what we now call childhood diseases—measles and chickenpox, particularly—decimated Indian societies. Whites also spread venereal diseases. Sexual violence was common, and syphilis was especially devastating to Indian women, who often died in childbirth, along with their infants. Birthrates plummeted, and soon natural reproduction was insufficient to sustain a population under assault.

Governments also played a role in the destruction of the California Indians. While the federal government made efforts to establish reservations for Indians, the efforts were halfhearted and undermined by state authorities who claimed that Washington wanted to hand over the “finest farming and mineral lands” to people “wholly incapable, by habit or taste, of appreciating its value.” The government of California supported whites by authorizing the indenture of Indians, a thinly disguised system of slavery, and it looked the other way when whites kidnapped Indian women and children to make them servants. The first civilian governor of California, Peter Burnett, sanctioned “a war of extermination . . . until the Indian race becomes extinct.”

Historians have also argued that profound social and cultural dislocation played a role in reducing the Indian population. The arrival of the forty-niners shattered the traditional family and tribal bonds that had previously sustained Indian life. Working for whites took men away from the villages, discouraging marriage and household formation, and suppressing reproduction. Families suffered further when impoverishment drove some Indian women into prostitution. Disrupted family structures and dependency on whites undermined the authority of tribal communities and sustaining traditional relationships. Making the right choices allowed a few individual Indians to survive, but Indian communities largely died.

The discovery of gold set forces in motion that caused a demographic catastrophe for Indians. California Indians resisted in many ways, but they were unable to save their homelands, societies, and often themselves.

Questions for Analysis

Summarize the Argument: Why did the forty-niners prove so deadly to the California Indians?

Analyze the Evidence: Why is murder not sufficient to explain the rapid decline of California Indians? What other causes contributed to their demise?

Consider the Context: What was the nature of the California Indians’ previous contact with whites? What was different about the arrival of the forty-niners?